By and large the first era of blogging was about speed and volume. And speed and volume do not allow for mentorship, building sources, or investing in writing and editing.

The sad reality is that blogging has given a generation of talented voices a big stage and a loose leash to build a name for themselves far quicker than they could have before. But almost none of them know how to be great reporters or great writers.

Putting the right words in the appropriate context that makes reading them meaningful still takes time and experience. It takes patience to tease a story out, to find evidence that presents the case for an the counter balance that seeks to verify it.

Becoming a publisher is not the same as having the ability to push the post button. Teaching an organization to read the news wearing the publisher's hat is quite intensive and tends to have no silver bullets along the way.

Start by making the commitment knowing that it's not going to be easy nor cheap and the reward may be a long time in coming.

Tasting the real deal

it's hard to talk about these topics in abstract. A few years back I sat down with one of our business leaders to interview him about what made some of our added services valuable.

We bounced the highlights from the interview with research and some hard thinking about our audience -- why should they give us their time to read our guide?

Luck has it that at the same time the organization had commissioned some wholesale content from a content farm as part of a campaign to drive leads. We may have gotten a few clicks on landing pages from the campaign. We got inbound inquiries as a follow up to the guide.

The challenge

Where I think the disconnect happens is setting the highest standards by pointing to a successful execution someone sees in market without knowing the effort put into producing it. The simpler it looks, the more horse power under the hood.

Great writing still takes time to conceive, plan, and execute even when it's part of a good strategy.

+++

Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.